Success: A Survival Guide

A twelve year system operations veteran, Adam is the CTO of Opscode, whose mission is to bring “Infrastructure Automation to the Masses”. He is the primary author of Chef.

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Shayan is CEO of Zoosk, the largest social dating destination, where he is busy revolutionizing online dating by leveraging social media. Prior to Zoosk, Shayan spent five years at Microsoft working on a variety of products. He holds an MS in CS from University of Maryland, and an MBA from University of Washington.

Brian Moon has been working with the LAMP platform since before it was called LAMP. He is the Senior Web Engineer for dealnews.com. He has made a few small contributions to the PHP project and been a casual participant in discussions on the PHP internals list. He is the founder and lead developer of the Phorum project, the first PHP/MySQL message board ever created.

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Don MacAskill is the co-founder, CEO, and Chief Geek at SmugMug. Back in the mists of time, Don built the network that powered eBay, Hotmail, and fatbrain. He lost his mind and spent an exhilarating few years making video games, but found it again with SmugMug. With no outside investment, he bootstrapped SmugMug into a business that’s profitable and growing – but most of all, fun!

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John has worked in systems operations for over fourteen years in biotech, government and online media. He started out tuning parallel clusters running vehicle crash simulations for the U.S. government, and then moved on to the Internet in 1997. He built the backing infrastructures at Salon, InfoWorld, Friendster, and Flickr. He is now VP of Tech Operations at Etsy, and is the author of The Art of Capacity Planning published by O’Reilly.

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Michael T. Halligan is a serial entrepreneur with over 5 years of experience in IT architecture and operations. His primary role is chief technical officer of BitPusher, LLC, a managed application hosting firm based out of San Francisco and Seattle. He is currently starting up a new Web application providing semantic search services to the convention industry. He previously held architectural and management positions at start-ups including Kontiki, Napster, and Register.com.

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Frank Mashraqi is a renowned speaker and scalability advisor to several startups. He has nearly a decade of scalability, engineering management and monetization experience. Prior to Opportunities, Frank was Co-founder and VP Technology of XGraph, an advertising company using social graph data to scale highly targeted campaigns. Prior to that, Frank was Director of Business Operations and Technical Strategy for Fotolog where he played a pivotal role in helping Fotolog scale to become the 13th largest website on the Internet (Alexa: based on traffic) and the third most actively used social network in the world (ComScore). He also led the disaster recovery efforts at Fotolog after a SAN crash threatened to put $100M acquisition offer in jeopardy. Frank holds a BBA in Accounting and a BS in Computer Information Systems. He lives in Menlo Park, CA and is passionate about helping entrepreneurs.

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